This Temporary Life
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: She has never been more aware of just how temporary life can be.   Kat POV


Another successful run, another load of civilians more or less safely shepherded through the cloud, and Kat feels each mission – _How many now? Five? Six? More?_ – in the ache of her bones, the burning of her skin, the liquid rattle of her lungs. Gods, even her hair hurts, or it would, if it weren't falling out in great, ugly clumps.

With burning eyes, she watches Athena, who looks none too healthy herself even days after her one and only trip through the radiation cloud; she runs to Helo as he steps out of the decontamination chamber. The distance isn't so great that Kat can't see that the radiation monitor on his wrist is as much black as it is white, mottled and ugly like some horrific bruise. Beside her, Racetrack says something to Kat, but she only hears part of what she says, something about the radiation being worse for toasters than humans. Across the hangar bay, Helo stumbles and Athena catches him, nearly falling under his weight. _How sick does a Cylon have to be to be overwhelmed by the weight of one human?_ Kat thinks. She can't help but wonder what would happen to their daughter, a little girl many would consider a dangerous freak, if neither of them were there to take care of her.

A hazard-suited woman, clipboard in hand, touches Kat lightly on the shoulder and gestures toward the decon chamber. "My turn, huh?" Kat croaks, her throat scratchy as hell, like she's swallowed ground glass. As she takes a step forward, her feet so heavy she feels as though her boots have melted into the deck, Athena leads Helo out of the hangar bay, her arm around his waist.

XXX

They're supposed to fly each mission in shifts, one group on while the other group recovers, but Kat can't do that. Her off time is filled with voices, faces from which she can't hide. She'd blame it all on Enzo, the bastard, bulling his way into the new life she'd made, but she can't do that, either. The weight of everything she's ever done, every misdeed, every mistake, pushes her, pokes at her until all she can do to silence the cacophony is run back to her bird, suit up for the next mission. Ferrying the citizens of the Fleet to relative safety is the only thing that quiets the voices of the ones who've already died. _Because of me_, something inside her whispers, but she squashes the thought, tells herself the Cylons would've attacked anyway, that it wasn't anything to do with her. She doesn't quite believe it. Will never fully believe it.

Kat hasn't flown twice as many missions through the cloud as the others, no one would stand for that, but she's pretty sure she's flown at least a couple extra. That knowledge alone makes her feel a little better, which is frakking ironic, given that those couple of extra trips are killing her. But maybe that's what she deserves.

She tears the radiation monitor from her wrist and slaps it down on a shelf in the temporary locker that's been assigned to her, peels off her flight suit, stepping out of it and kicking it to the side. She reaches for a towel and it clips the monitor on the way out; the strap slips part way off the shelf, catches on something so that the face of it dangles in front of her still burning eyes, mocking her. It's turned to black, the dark of it nearly solid with only a fleck of white here and there. She stares at it and bile rises to her throat.

"Kat? You okay?" Helo's voice, filled with concern, galvanizes her and she pushes the damned thing back onto the shelf, slams the locker door shut. The rough sound of his voice tells her that he's still feeling the effects of exposure, too.

Blinking hard, pissed off at the tears that unexpectedly blur her vision, she turns toward Helo and does her best to smile. "Yeah, Helo, I'm fine." The smile, the words, all lies. Just like her life.

Watching her from the hatchway, a towel around his waist and another around his shoulders, skin and hair still damp from a recent shower, he frowns. "You should try to get some rest." Stepping over the threshold, he heads for his own locker, a light hand on her shoulder in sympathy as he passes. His locker is just as temporary as hers, but Kat can't help but notice when he opens it that there is a photograph of his daughter stuck to the inside of the door, a reminder of what this is all about.

Later, when she returns from her own shower and there is no one else around, Kat takes her black and ugly monitor from her locker and switches it for Helo's. She has never been more aware of just how temporary life can be.

XXX

It takes everything she has left to bring her bird back home. She can barely see through her damaged eyes, barely hear her pilots reporting in over the comms as each one lands, not necessarily smoothly, back on _Galactica_'s deck. Her own body fights her as she moves her stick, doing the best she can to put her Raptor down in one piece. Pilots can be replaced; their birds can't.

Nausea churns in her stomach at the jarring impact when she touches down. Every vibration, every sound, every flash of light just makes it worse and she swallows hard, not wanting to vomit in her helmet again. Once was more than enough.

Slowly she becomes aware that she has indeed landed, that the movement she feels is just the damage to her inner ear. The swaying, spinning motion isn't real, not that this recognition helps alleviate the nausea. Pushing herself to move, Kat unfastens her harness, rises shakily to her feet. She fumbles for a few seconds to get the hatch open, and when she takes a step forward, her spinning head and watering eyes cause her to misstep. She falls to the deck, not feeling the pain she's sure must be there.

XXX

The voices have returned, but this time, she thinks maybe they're not just in her head. One of them is the Old Man and she struggles to open her eyes, but it's more than she can manage. She can feel the sweat from her efforts forming on her skin, pooling in the creases, and the sting of it is almost unbearable. The voices fade along with her awareness.

Some time later, she has no clue how long, she becomes aware that she is in a bed, that someone is sitting beside her. He holds her hand, gently strokes her palm, and she thinks that may be the only part of her skin that isn't burned. She wants to open her eyes, to see his face, but again the effort to lift her lids is too much. She knows who it is, anyway, and the enormity of it all hits her, that this may be the last time he'll ever stroke her skin again. She's never regretted her slip with Enzo more.

The tears fall, acid tracks down her cheeks.

"Brendan," she tries to say, but she can't force her lips to move, can't dredge up the breath to make herself heard.

"Shh," he breathes, as if he can hear his name, trapped behind her lips, but she's already drifted back down.

XXX

"_Son of a bitch!" she exploded, her irritation at the squadron's sloppy maneuvers bubbling over. Her first time out as the one solely in charge, and they were making her look like an idiot._

"_Your comms are open, Captain," Lee Adama reminded her mildly from Pegasus' CIC. Easy for him to sound so frakking calm. He wasn't the one with a bunch of fraktards who couldn't follow a simple command if it saved their life or their ship. Which was kind of the whole point of the exercise, wasn't it?_

"_Sorry, Commander. Won't happen again." Frak. Maybe she was an idiot._

"—never liked your voice?" Apollo laughs softly. "I don't know. It just grated on me. I probably shouldn't tell you that, but dammit, this frakking pisses me off." She feels the slight motion of air on too-sensitive skin when he leans in closer, his chair scraping a bit with his shifting weight. "I'm going to miss hearing your voice over the comms." His voice drops lower, softer. "I thought my father was crazy, making you CAG, but it was a good call. You did a good job, Kat. You'll be missed."

He falls silent but doesn't move away, and the only sound in the room is her own labored breathing, punctuated by Doc Cottle's machines, beeping away along with her pulse.

XXX

When Racetrack comes to visit in the wake of Admiral Adama, Kat's still feeling okay from the last burst of morpha and makes an effort to stay with her, to talk to her, but it's mostly Maggie doing the talking. In spite of the sandpaper sound of her voice, she sounds so normal, regaling Kat with stories of Triad games and the Chief's hooch and flying CAP with a hangover. Anything but radiation burns and sickness. Babbling, really, but Kat appreciates it anyway.

Forgetting herself for just a moment, she tries to sit up, which is a mistake. The pain alone nearly blinds her and the heart monitor goes wild, bringing both Cottle and Ishay at a run. Poor Maggie backs away from the bedside, hands held out from her sides.

"Gods. I didn't do anything. I swear!" she protests.

"Not your fault," Cottle tells her, "but get the frak out of the way." His voice is gentle, almost kind, belying the brusqueness of the command. Ishay tells Maggie she can come back in an hour or so.

"Mags," Kat croaks, needing to catch her before she leaves. "Hot Dog." She can't manage much more than that just now, and it comes out in a rasping whisper. "Brendan…"

XXX

The med bay is quiet. Even the beeping of the monitors is subdued, the volume turned down to allow her to rest undisturbed. A steady stream of visitors has left her exhausted and Ishay finally chased the last one out only a few minutes before. Doc Cottle checks her vital signs and adjusts the morpha drip, pulls a cigarette from his pocket and puts it between his lips. But then he looks down at Kat for a moment, puts it back in his pocket, and finally walks across the room to take up vigil in a chair in the corner.

Kat floats on a soft, fluffy cloud, a mixture of morpha and exhaustion. It's a nice change of pace as she drifts away again, feeling no pain.

A voice pulls her back and she opens eyes that can no longer see. He holds her hand again, strokes the once soft skin of her inner wrist, places a gentle kiss there.

"Racetrack said you asked for me. She kinda hunted me down."

She smiles at him, or at least hopes she does; she can't feel her face anymore. Increased pressure on her hand tells her that maybe she succeeded. He doesn't say anything else and she drifts away again, for a time, comforted by the steady beeps of the monitors and his presence.

When she swims back up, he's still there, still holding her hand. White light is everywhere, filling the med bay, filling her. She feels stronger than she has in days, maybe ever. The pain is gone and so is the morpha cloud.

"Brendan." Her voice is steady, clear, and his fingers tighten around hers. She turns her head toward him, her smile as bright as the light that fills her.

He slips from the chair to his knees, her hand now held tightly in both of his as he kneels by her bedside. "I don't want you to go," he whispers and she hears the tears in his voice, knows that if she could reach out and touch his face, she'd feel their wetness on her fingertips. "Don't go. I need you to keep me in line."

"Frak that, Costanza," she whispers. "I need you to live. Promise me," she demands, knowing she's stronger than he is, always has been. Worried that without her to occasionally bully him into taking care of himself, he might just spin out of control.

She waits for his answer, the light growing so bright it almost drowns out his reluctant reply when it finally comes. "I promise."

_See that you keep that promise or I'll frakkin' haunt your ass._ The words aren't spoken aloud; the strength she felt only moments before abruptly deserts her and she drifts away to the now steady tone of the monitors, no longer beeping in time with a heart that has stopped. She's gone when Brendan flicks off the monitor to silence its keening and then quietly slips away.


End file.
